Qualifying Notes
- George Russell qualified 17th and Robert Kubica 18th for the Chinese Grand Prix
- George continued to better his laptime throughout the session, finishing P17 with a time of 1:35.253
- Robert improved on his third and final flying lap to a 1:35.281, which means he will line up P18 for tomorrow’s race
Dave Robson, Senior Race Engineer: Following some useful testing in FP3, we had another busy qualifying session as each driver completed three runs. The trackside team of engineers and mechanics, with help from the strategists back in Grove, did a very good job of getting both drivers into good positions on track for all runs. The drivers also did a good job, and although there are always things that we could’ve done a little better, together we got almost all of what the car had to offer today. Today we also benefited from the misfortunes of Albon and Giovinazzi, but we know that they will be very keen to get past us early in tomorrow’s race.
George Russell: Starting P17 is definitely higher than we expected going into this weekend. It was a fairly decent session, we are getting closer to everybody else and as a team we are slightly more competitive. We are understanding the car better and getting more out of the set-up which has enabled us to find some laptime. We will go out and give it everything tomorrow and see what we can do.
Robert Kubica: It has been a surprising qualifying with the balance of the car. I struggled a lot in the first run where I had massive oversteer which I was not expecting, as we’ve struggled with understeer all weekend. We have to try and understand this as it came as a surprise. Tomorrow will not be easy, managing the tyres will be important especially depending on the ambient and track temperatures but it will be the same for all of us.
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